Start warming up your wrist joints.  You’re going to need them for a facepalm in a short bit.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has offered, over the past few years, several theories often labelled “controversial”.  Here’s an overview, via The Independent:

1. Beautiful people are more likely to have female children than male children
2. Liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives
3. Muslim society has applied evolutionary pressure to make it much more likely for a Muslim to be a suicide bomber than for anyone else to
4. Men are selected to prefer blondes
5. Humans are evolved to be more prone to polygyny than polyandry, because historically a woman would be better off with a fraction of a rich man’s attention than all of a poor man’s, and the reverse was not true
6. Married couples with sons are less likely to divorce than those without
7. Adolescent peaks of criminality and creative endeavors have the same cause: evolved sexual competitiveness at that age
8. It is not that men have evolved a mid-life crisis.  Rather, it is a behavioral response to their wives’ menopause
9. It is to be expected, evolutionarily, that male politicians will risk their careers for an extramarital affair
10. Sexual harassment does not indicate the presence of anti-female sentiment; rather, it indicates that men are indiscriminating, because they abuse, harass, and degrade men as well

Woo-hoo!  Take your pick!  What offends you?  “Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct,” he states.  See that?  Short, inflammatory, and quotable!

OK, tabulation: what offends me?  That this fucker’s logical reasoning is pervasively flawed.  He repeatedly conflates correlation and causation; he relies on debunked, inaccurate, and culturally-dependent measures such as I.Q.; he assumes a person’s religion is the religion of his forebears; he relies on too much armchair reasoning and too little field investigation; he takes as a given that a six-point gap in I.Q. will be evident in first meetings of strangers; and generally he just acts like an imbecile.  If he’s right, he’s right for the wrong reasons.  And that’s worse than being wrong.

Are some of his theories speculations correct?  Maybe.  It is almost certain that some things labelled “political correctness” at some times and in some places are inconsistent with some facts of evolutionary development.  Well, duh.  But it’s not binary, and it’s not monolithic.  Why is he willing to make such a facile statement as “human nature is simply not politically correct”?  Not quite sure — but one can be certain that this willingness to dichotomize and falsely generalize characterizes his entire approach to the subject matter.  I think it worth noting that Steven Pinker, working in a related field but who has different horses in the race, has quote-reasoned-unquote his way to opposite conclusions, such as his claim that the validity of political conservatism over political liberalism is confirmed by the observation that artificial intelligence software with distributed rather than top-down organization functions better (I did not make that up.)

This should be a “move along, folks, nothing to see here” — except that many who deny evolution are likely to be offended by some or all of this (Especially Claim #2.  If you disagree that political conservatism and religiosity have a strong positive correlation with denial of evolution, I would love to know how you get Internet access on whatever planet you’re living on.  [↓Insert obvious comparison to Kanazawa's reasoning here↓])  And if it’s used as reinforcement that evolutionary theory must be nonsense and hateful and eugenic, and resisted at all cost, the … um … someone will have won.  And someone will have lost.  Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway: that is what pisses me off.  Fucker.

Hey, readers, that time of the year again, when I ask you to help support this site by using my Amazon referral link for holiday gifts (or other items) you might be buying anyway!

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar: Amazon.com

And thanks!

Here is the formal mcgees.org privacy policy, in case you didn’t see the link in the sidebar.  It is long, but I think it’s actually useful and readable (perhaps this is a new innovation!), and the key stuff (a handful of sentences) is in bold text.

I’ve established explicit licenses for content on mcgees.org.  The link also appears (as of this writing) in the “Site” section of the sidebar.

Insectoid aliens attack Earth, but target the insects, both out of racial bias and (rightly?) considering them the apex creatures.  Humanity fights on behalf of them, realizing that if arthropods are eliminated, almost all (or actually all?) terrestrial multicellular life would disappear.

I may have the record for “most views in the first hour”.  But we can beat that!

(Not that I’m needy.)

But Their Pride’s of the Summer. That Cometh First.

When I was a kid, we outcast-feeling geek kids who had no luck with or understanding of girls related to the characters in Stand By Me.  Not only am I sure that kids these days can relate, too, but there’s an entirely new level to it, thinking about the actors.

So, kids, listen up:

The four boys in the film were played by River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, and Jerry O’Connell.  Growing up, the “popular girls” I knew thought River dark and mysterious and gorgeous, Corey a pinup heartthrob, Wil an awkward overy-polite geek, and Jerry an awkward overly-polite fat kid.

Today?  Jerry is a movie star who has shed all the weight, become an über-hunk, and has two children with Rebecca freakin’ Romijn.  Wil is maybe the best-respected celeb geek in the world, a bestselling author widely admired for his writing, acting, advocacy, eloquence, and humor.  Corey Feldman, on the other hand, is the butt of many jokes and very lucky not to be dead or in prison for tons of poorly-thought-out choices in his life — of which the “popular girls” would have approved.  And River?  If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because he’s dead.  He died of a drug overdose, covered in vomit, in the middle of the night on a Los Angeles street, and people really don’t talk about him much any longer.

So, take comfort.  Geek power.

(Oh, and the girls who did find Wil and Jerry the cute ones back then?  Like us, weren’t popular either.  But they were the ones worth getting to know.  It’ll work out.  I don’t know the young stars these days, but, um: that-one-guy-from-Glee-or-Twilight (?) whom all the popular girls like?  Is going to end up silly or dead.  And that-other-guy-from-Glee-or-Twilight whom they think is a geek?  Is going to succeed.  So, hint: look for the girls your age who like the geeky boys.  They’re the winners.)

Following a link someone posted on Twitter tonight, I started thinking about my favorite speeches given by American politicians during this nation’s short existence.  And my favorites are those treasured, I expect, by many.  High on the list:

• Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863
• Lyndon Johnson’s address in 1965 to the joint session of Congress on voting legislation
• Robert Kennedy on the occasion of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968
• FDR’s first inaugural in 1933

And I realize that I now put Obama’s 2008 remarks on New Hampshire Primary Night on the same list.  I mean, it’s not just me, right?  Seriously, shit’s the shit.  Are kids memorizing it yet?  They should.  And if they’re not, they will.  Of that I’m certain.

I haz a new Six Minute Story: http://sixminutestory.com/read/loud-in-the-silence

Driving through a sleeping suburb last night, I saw a glowing “Open” sign in a window, not only long after what I would consider small-business operating hours, but in what I would have considered a residential community.

I was very curious, but more intriguingly, I had a chill run up my spine remembering something.  I started thinking about a fantasy short story I remembered reading some years ago, about a college student who found a glowing “Open” sign in the window of a business, late at night, in what he thought was a residential community.  He goes in, meets a quirky shopkeeper who collects barometers, has a long discussion about the phenomenon of good answers to bad questions, and ends up on a weird, mysterious path when he discovers later that the shopkeeper has bequeathed something to him.  Something something writing advanced queries to search National Weather Service databases something something dude’s a CalTech undergrad with a hot girlfriend something something a bizarre bit about collectible miniature elephant figurines.  The story ends in the dusty attic of a long-vacant house with a slightly-ambiguous ending.  And I remembered it rather fondly — like, that I had really dug the tone, felt entranced, that kind of thing.  So I’m driving, nostalgic, trying to remember what the story was, and I realize…

The story was written in 1998.  And I.  Am.  The.  Fucking.  Author.  It was the story I submitted for my “final” in a college creative writing class.

Gah.

Now if I can only inspire these experiences in other people?  Maybe I have a shot of “making it” as a fiction writer!

In the past few days, Vedder’s lines from the Pearl Jam song ½ Full have been replaying in my head.  It’s been “one of those few days”:

Climbing over mountains, floating out on the sea.  Far from lights of a city, the elements, they speak to me.  Whispering that life existed long before greed.  Balancing the world on its knee.

Don’t see some men as half-empty.  See them half-full of shit.  Thinking that we’re all but slaves.  “There ain’t gonna be no middle anymore”; it’s been said before.  The haves be having more, yet still bored.

Won’t someone save…?  Won’t someone save the world?

Eventually Galen will figure out where the bug in his Ruby on Rails code is that explains why each of my stories seems to get hugely more hits — and insanely quickly — compared to almost any other author’s, but until then, I will revel in the delight that this one — “A Tensile Moment” — seems likewise to be soaring in site views.

Enjoy!

When Niall was three years old, and he would be inconsolable, I would try picking him up, turning him upside down, laughing, and tickling him.  Low-tech, and sometimes it failed.  But sometimes it worked.

When an adult is inconsolable, the techniques that occur to me are not much more sophisticated.  Whether I do or not, I am tempted to try a joke.  Being inconsolable is scary for me.

But is that remedy or manipulation?  Am I trying to find purchase to generate enough leverage to change the other person?  Give me a place to stand and a joke funny enough and I will move his or her world?

Maybe.  Perhaps it is an attempted remedy for me, and my fears.  It could make things worse; I always fear that, too.  And would distraction be a remedy, after all?  Maybe it would just hide the sadness for a bit.

Well, maybe that’s the point.  If time heals all wounds, perhaps that time would best be spent laughing.

(Three Word Wednesday is an effort to create a distributed online writers’ collective by, once per week, giving a uniform prompt to writers.  This week, the words were joke, remedy, and leverage.)

My third effort at Six Minute Story is up, and is entitled “A Lonely, Lonely Wasteland”.  This strikes me as a bit of a weak title, and it’s moitié-moitié among the readers who have contacted me so far whether I made any sense in using the word “forked” as a metaphor.

One clicks a box, sees a prompt (in this case an image), and, simultaneously, a 6 minute countdown timer starts.  In the case of this image, what I thought was a forked stick was … um … a pair of legs.  So the story will make more sense if one “fixes” the image.  To match.

I’ve blogged about this before, but ~10 years ago, news started flying around the (newborn) blogosphere that Wil Wheaton (best known, at that point, for Star Trek: The Next Generation) had begun a blog!  HA! So we all rushed over to laugh.

And … well, shit.  He was awesome.  Struggling actor; great stepdad; fucking awesome writer; even lived nearby.

His writing turned into book deals, which were even better.  His acting became more and more successful.  And he slowly moved from alt.ensign-crusher.die.die.die among geeks to Super Geek Overlord.

He’s been picking up great gigs — Eureka, Big Bang Theory, The Guild — and further cementing himself as geek idol.  He’s a fixture at Comi-Con.  He is super-humble — his normal response to his fame, he explains, is shock, because “I’m just this guy, you know!”  He’s also known for (further-)popularizing the phrase “Don’t Be A Dick”, which is a fine motto for life.

So it’s his birthday today.  On Twitter, where he has, by the way, >1.6M followers, stuff just — well, kept getting awesomer.  Awesomer and awesomerer.

ThinkGeek marked today as “Don’t Be A Dick Day”. Twitter users from John Hodgman, Peewee Herman, and the joke “Death Star PR” account, to NASA (yes, that NASA) tweeted him happies.  Apparently his birthday showed up on Entertainment Tonight.  Nathan freakin’ Fillion tweeted him wishes, adding “Stay shiny” (!).  People started making him shit, both physical and digital.  And this graphic was created — which, OK, to be fair, you’re gonna have to be a geek to really appreciate — and sent to him:

Another user started a #toastwheaton hashtag, urging people to raise a glass and take a picture (I joined.)

Wil Wheaton, for his part, chatted with people, was publicly thankful, and tweeted about the gifts from his family, including a vintage Casio calculator watch from his stepson (he exclaimed how awesome it was that the default year in the date setting was “1980″.)  He took a picture of the results of the first calculation on the watch.  Yes, 42.

Just wow.  Geek overload (the colloquial term is “nerdgasm”, for the record).  This might be my favorite birthday ever, and it’s not even my birthday.

Here is Wil Wheaton on Twitter.  And this search will let you follow more good @wilw birthday stuff.

If you don’t get why this is cool or funny: I’m sorry.  Sucks for you!

The Gibson Les Paul guitar is by a near-infinite margin my favorite electric guitar.  As what I play and write is mostly bluesy and funky grunge, there is nothing remotely like a heavy slab of mahogany and their particular pickups to get an incomparable thunk sound out of an instrument.  Using only the neck pickup and doing stuff like strumming hard enough to bounce the strings off the fretboard only enhance this.

So I was really interested when I saw a link to the article ”15 Iconic Les Paul Players” at gibson.com, and while I agree with most of their inclusions (Jimmy Page, Slash, Ace Frehley, and Pete Townshend, for instance), there were a couple of frustrating omissions.  Some should-be-obvious guitarists such as Neil Young, some recent converts that might easily be missed such as Alex Lifeson, and those in my personal pantheon (that might not be in everyone’s) such as Stone Gossard and Adam Jones.  But the most bizarre omission?  Les Freakin’ Paul.

I miss my axe.  I hate thieves.

So, if you were to imagine the most amusing thing that could have fallen out of your backpack at the library, leading the librarian to rush after you to return it, what would it be?  ‘Cos my story today pwns everything else I can think of.  Mostly because, had it been intentional, it would have been legendarily corny.  Contemplating doing that on purpose would have made Tobias Fünke blush.

On Sunday, Bishop Donal McKeown addressed a 112-year-old Irish temperance association in a homily during which he spent a large portion of the time discussing clerical abuse:

Many criticised the Holy Father when, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he spoke of the need to do penance and proposed that Friday should be kept as a weekly day of penance.  Some commentators dismissed that as asking the ordinary people of Ireland to do penance for the sins of clergy and bishops — and they couldn’t understand that idea.  But all Christians come from the strange belief that Jesus is the innocent One, the Lamb of God that took away the sin of the world.  Our secular society — that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility — cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can. … Continue to do penance for the sins of those Church personnel who abused children.

He also, by the way, wished that the “secular hierarchy” would “accept that they too share responsibility” for child abuse because they are entrusted with “righteously punishing offenders”.  These would be the same offenders that the Church has … actually, never mind.  There’s just simply nothing snarky that I can say here that would begin to do this wickedness justice.  I guess I can sum it up this way: the bishop is right in his argument that this is strong evidence for the existence of evil and the need for reparation.  But the evil is in his speech, and the responsibility for reparation is not on the secular.

Idea:  We all have nonstandard characters that we want to use in our posts, tweets, status updates, emails, comments, and what have you.  In the dark ages, one had to enter the character entity in HTML markup to have it show up in a post (entering “ö” for “ö”, for instance.)  Entering the actual character (the “ö”, for instance) could make your character disappear when you hit “Submit” or (!) crash the software that ran the blog or message board (I told you it was the dark ages.)

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

Here’s a self-indulgent post (another, I guess).  I’ve been thinking about my favorite music videos of all time.  This is sure to be a fascinating list, given that I don’t watch music videos, and haven’t since the mid-’90s, so the chance that these are representative in any fashion is vanishingly small.

Still, though, these five struck me as seminal when I first saw them.  All (huh) were directed by feature film directors, significant animators, or those who went on to direct feature films.  I believe this suggests something about the legitimacy of the art form.

In chronological order:

1984, Thriller by Michael Jackson
Director John Landis directed the films The Blues Brothers, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the (excellent) Masters of Horror episode “Family”

1990, Vogue by Madonna
Director David Fincher directed the films Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

1994, Sabotage by Beastie Boys
Director Spike Jonze directed the films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are

1998, Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam
Directors were Todd McFarlane (the artist behind Spawn) and Kevin Altieri of Batman: The Animated Series

2009, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
Director Francis Lawrence directed the film I Am Legend and has another in development

Let me know what you think.  I think they’re all worth watching, and were the best among those I watched.

I was told yesterday that I look like rock star Claudio Sanchez, a name I didn’t know.  So I went looking for a pic, and thought I’d strike the same pose to show that is nonsense:

A new meme floating about is I Write Like, a statistical analyzer wherein one pastes a writing sample — longer is better — and the software determines, according to metrics the programmer has chosen, which author’s writing most resembles.

Reading on forums, it’s apparently actually doing something, and the author has promised to provide more info on the algorithms.

I posted a chapter from my unfinished sci-fi novel — a bit reluctantly — and this is what I got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

OK.  I guess I can live with that.

The recent Sharron Angle post gets this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Pardon me while I go celebrate.  There’s nothing like affirmation by a piece of software using secret criteria.

Government responses to various ad campaigns:

“Join our health club and you will live forever” → Fines
“Join our diet program and you will live forever” → Fines, FDA investigation
“Join our church and you will live forever” → Tax exemption

Say you’re at the mall.  There’s a little table with survey forms.  You pick up one of the surveys.  It reads: “Tell us who your friends are, where you went to school, when your birthday is, whether you’re in a relationship (and with whom), what your interests are, what causes you support, your sex, (continued on back)”  At that point you realize the form is several pages long.  At the end of it it says “Also, please allow us to contact you by email FOR ANY REASON WE WANT, including ads that we tailor to your personal info.”  Now you’re getting excited.  What can I win?  A vacation to Paris?  A new Lexus?  A PRIVATE JET?!  I mean, this is a LOT of info to give a stranger, right?  The payoff must be AWESOME!

So you read the sign on the front of the table.  It says “Fill out one of our forms, and we will tell one of your friends you wish you could hug him or her / send one of your friends a PRETEND cup of coffee / ask him or her, on your behalf, what Simpsons character he or she is most like / etc.”

Do you fill out the form?

Friends:  This.  Is what.  You are doing.  When you accept a Facebook app request.

Do you know about Sharron Angle yet?  She is the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the 2010 election challenging Harry Reid. 

So, here’s a HuffPost article about a January 2010 exchange on the Bill Manders show.  You can play the audio at that link, but here’s a transcript:

Manders:  I, too, am pro life.  But I’m also pro choice.  Do you understand what I mean when I say that?

Angle:  I’m pro responsible choice.  There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders:  Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle:  Not in my book.

Manders:  So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something [trails off]?

Angle:  You know, I’m a Christian.  And I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations.  And we need to have a little faith in many things.

So — going to try to be exquisitely fair here: if a father holds his little girl down and rapes her, and she becomes pregnant, God could intercede.  If he doesn’t intercede, that’s part of his plan.  We would be sinning and subverting divine will if we allowed the girl to have an abortion.  The proper response is faith in God.

Does that about cover it?

This.  Woman.  Is running.  For national office.

She is the candidate of the more-conservative of the two main U.S. political parties.

Before I move on to the rest of my post, let’s get this vile piece of Angular detritus out of the way.  It is too late to unspeak the words she spoke about rape and incest.  That horse has left.  There is no way you mess that one up that bad.  It’s more absurd than saying, ‘Officer, when I said ‘Open the register and give me all your money!’, I meant to say ‘Do I have to buy something to get some change for the pay phone?’”

So, I’m setting my clock as of the timestamp of this post.  The RNC has 48 hours to withdraw all support for Angle.  That much is a given.  A statement on the order of “We were unaware of the insanity of Ms. Angle, and we apologize for our previous support of her.  The Republican National Committee does not oppose abortion in the case of rape nor incest.  We disown anyone who argues otherwise, for any reason, including superstitious special pleading.”  If they do not, they are complicit.  If they do not, and if you are registered Republican, you must be publicly vocal about how abhorrent this is, and at least write a letter to the party, or you are complicit.  That’s my line in the sand.

OK, now that I’ve established (to my satisfaction) that she is reprehensibly inhuman, or sociopathic, or both, my main point is done.  But I want to take a look at something very interesting that fell into place while researching this post.  I want to argue that this functions as a case study of when some religious conservatives choose to play the “illegally imposing their agendas” card.  Let’s do a little quoting:

Here’s Sharron Angle’s official “About” page on her website:

She is proud of her past chairwomanship of We The People Nevada PAC

We The People used to have a web presence, but no longer.  But that’s what archive.org is for.  Stored on the archive servers 2005-03-11:

There is a strong movement by atheists to ban religious thought form the public square.  This should be recognized as an attempt to establish atheism as the national religion. … The ACLU, NEA, and other organizations are examples of atheistic institutions trying to gain political control and an unfair advantage over Christian groups

So: atheists are trying to illegally impose their religious beliefs (“lack thereof”, actually, but when your only book is the Bible, everything looks like a faith), through political means, to the unfair detriment of some others, in a fashion that would set national policy.

One more.  Also from the cached PAC page:

The radical homosexual movement and other groups seek to destroy the traditional family structure which is the underpinning of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

Gay activists (and, remember, the ACLU was implicated above) are trying to destroy the underpinnings of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

So, tying it together: silly, silly, silly me.  You know how crazy-liberal I am?  I thought one of the underpinnings of society was undoing the harm caused by fathers who rape their children.  I thought that, given that We the People and I agree that “The establishment clause prevents the combining of the state with religious organizations”, that dictating the definitions of what family means — not only who can get married, but why it is OK to let a god mediate when a “traditional family” is destroyed by a villain from the inside — on the basis of what the god the person speaking happens to believe in is interpreted to desire — could be considered … pretty much nuts.

But that’s just me.  I’m an atheist.  I, therefore, am probably using this unfairly in an effort to make my lack of religion the official national religion, to the unfair disadvantage of these Christians.  Who, of course, have no such desires.  Unless they win.

(For the sake of rigor:  I haven’t been able to determine [help?] what years Angle chaired We The People, and cross-reference it against archive.org caches of their “Principles” page during her tenure.  Until I get this, it is just conceivable that this politician who thinks that abortion is not justified even in cases of child rape does not believe in a conspiracy of gays and atheists to destroy America.  I think that’s unlikely.  I expect you would think so, too.  But let me know if it’s that’s the case.  I’ll have to Google for another example.  In the interests of efficiency, I’ll start with listings of Tea Party candidates.)

As Plato quoted Heraclitus, and the peerless Dr. Nathan Tierney had us memorize, “ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ”.  Tomorrow may be better.  It may be worse.  But it will certainly be different.

As the Sufis graced us, and Lincoln quoted:

هذا أيضا سوف يمر أو يعدي

And, with any luck, when it passes, it will pass into publication.  Properly lived, then properly rendered, it may be exquisite — and, it is to be hoped, meaningful to Niall in his adulthood.

But that is not for now.  For tonight, I console myself with Tibullus’ elegy: “Credula vitam spes fovet et melius cras fore semper dicit“.  The hope may be unwarranted, but it is good enough for a pillow.  Good night.  See you on the flip-side, friends.

Article:  Demonstrates ‘Mozart Effect’ nonexistent w/r/t making babies smarter

How obvious this was:  Utterly

Reaction to white mothers’ turning “Baby Mozart” into an empire:  *facepalm*

Motivation to explain this to ex-wife who wanted to buy those insipid discs for Niall:  Precisely zero

Why the motivation was zero:  Ah, I see you’ve never been married!

When I first heard of this research:  1993

Who told me:  One of my oldest and dearest friends

Indication of the distortion of research by the time it reached me:  “Rock music makes you dumber, especially grunge.”

Vindication:  “The key to it is that you have to enjoy the music,” says original researcher. “If you hate Mozart you’re not going to find a Mozart Effect.  If you love Pearl Jam, you’re going to find a Pearl Jam effect.”

When I’m going to abandon the device of a mock Q&A:  Right now

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• I've seen enough #Galaxy matches to be CERTAIN where Landon was sending that penalty kick. Good thing #GHA didn't watch the tapes. #
• Dear refs: that hard part in the #GHA player's arm is called "an elbow". HTH. #
• Did Ayew even TOUCH him?! Looked like #USA simulation to me! #
• Switched from drinking Camparis and Soda to God's Blessings — 'cause it's freaking COLD here in the #NorthEastKingdom. Go #USA! #Vermont #
• Merde merde merde merde merde. C'mon, #USA! #
• It is NEVER acceptable to cheer for someone's severe ill health. Oh wait, yes it is. http://n.pr/doHgFa #
• .@wikipediagame: SO CLOSE to cool. But no way to see who won; how your paths compare with others'; naive scoring. http://wikipediagame.org/ #
• Sitting alone sobbing at @postsecret and wondering how often I've caused similar pain. That's not a secret. It's a recommendation. Go read. #
• 12 hours until #ENG-#GER! #WorldCup #OverlyInvested #
• Did #TchadBlake point the #Kunstkopf AWAY FROM #PearlJam when recording #NothingAsItSeems on the #Binaural record? Weird. #audio #audiophile #
• .@PennyRoyal67 I worked to develop a #poetry mag while in college. Typing "Poet of the Month", an editor wrote "…of the Moth". We kept it. #

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