XMA

When you really take the time to look closely at XMA, Wushu, Capoeira, Breakdancing, Parkour, or any other hip 90s folk dance I'm forgetting, you quickly realize that it's just amateur gymnastics, and that makes it a little less cool.  Then you realize that all the people who do it aren't good enough to do real gymnastics, and it becomes completely sad.

This Is Why I Don't Go to Church

http://blog.beliefnet.com/projectconversion/2011/08/dear-muhammad.html 

Just read this thing a friend from work posted talking about how beautiful it is, and I don't know what the fuck this guy poked into his keyboard.  These bobble-headed drones are sitting back critiquing this poor bastard as he apparently has a major psychotic break.  Dear fucking Jehosophat, people, get this man some Thorazine.

Rules for Living Number Whatever

Women are always cold.  Always.  Any woman who isn't currently wearing a full sweatsuit is just trying to look good.  Any woman who tells you she sleeps in the nude or walks around the house in panties is just trying to turn you on.

We're in the Top Quartile! Go USA!

Americans are obsessed with being number one in everything.  We have been for a long time.  Isn't that the point of the Space Race?  How dare the largest nation in the world try to land on the Moon before we do?  How about the 2008 Olympics?  How dare the most populous nation in the world get more Olympic gold medals? 

I have some sad news, America.  It turns out there's no prize.  When the Earth finally plummets into the Sun or the asteroid hits or whatever, Jesus isn't going to resurrect all the Americans and say, "You guys were the best sonsofbitches of all time!  Here's your trophy!"

Career Advice

I think one of the greatest jobs ever would be Dumbbell Engineer.  Imagine going in to see your boss at the end of the week and having him ask,
Boss - So, how did that 25 pound dumbbell design go?
You - Check it out.  Twenty.  Five.  Pounds, son.
B - Goddamnit, you've done it again.  Dare I ask, twenty-five point what?
Y - Twenty-five point zero.
B - That's a bonus check!

Language Matters pt. 1

I'll tell all you guys a secret:  women hate it when you use the word "cocksucker" as an insult.  You know why?  It's pretty easy.  Every guy who's reading this who doesn't want a woman to perform this service for him wants  a man to do it.  You guys are pretty inconsistent about whether this is a desirable or undesirable act.  You can't ask someone to be what you just declared someone you hate or want to dismiss to be.

Instead, try to work it into conversation as a positive thing.  "Dude, the cafeteria has free pie this afternoon."  "That's the most spuzz-gargling news I've heard all day!"  Work on making the phrase as positive as the act and some day you can ask your kids, "How was school today, kids?"  "School sucked a big fat one today, Dad!"  "Excellent."

Buying Trophies

Looking over your shoulder and peering intently into the horizon are two different ways of tripping over your own two feet.I mention these things because I have been reminded recently of how so many people allow either parents or children to be an excuse for failure.

Japan is obsessed with filial responsibility and I haven't seen it benefit anyone yet.  I had a student explain to me once how she could never get a tattoo because she doesn't own her body.  Her parents made it for her and she doesn't have the right to deface their gift.  If that's so then her parents' bodies must belong to their parents and so on.  I suppose it follows that any Japanese person who wants a tattoo should have some kids and tattoo them.

Western cultures often promote the same absurdity in the opposite direction.  A person should live for the sake of his or her children, who should live for the sake of their children and so on.  It turns us all into nothing more than hairy Von Neumann machines.  The only hope we can really have is for our great^x-grandchildren to wind up gay, but it puts a lot of pressure on him to enjoy all the foregone happiness of his ancestors stretching back through antiquity.  I'm glad Franklin Roosevelt never wasted time sitting around and wondering how to teach his children to be future world leaders.  Were would we be today if Tomas Edison had spent his days reading books on how to foster his children's creativity?  In the dark.  That's where. 

Since both of these approaches to live send everyone into an infinite loop, there must be at least a third option.  I say it's this:  the only reasonable timespan for obligation must be within one's own life and time.  If your parents created you just so you would worship and serve them, they did it for entirely selfish reasons and deserve no gratitude.  If you really want your kids to be rich and successful, get rich and be successful and you'll be in the position to set up a good trust fund for them.  Sabotaging your own success because you claim it supports your children is just an excuse for failure.

People who live for their parents or children are trying to ape truly successful families like a pickup artist with a fake Rolex is trying to ape an actual successful man.  The hot girl, the proud parents, or the happy children are a reward for accomplishment.  They aren't the actual accomplishment.  To put it more simply, there is no Nobel Prize for Nobel-Prize-Seeking.

To Catch a Time Traveler

“When I was a kid I wanted to invent a time machine. Read all the science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, Wells. How was it going to work? Many Worlds Hypothesis maybe? Straight Back to the Future-style paradoxes? I didn’t know. So I went to the best university I could get into, which should have been the first red flag, and made my first discovery: I was really bad at math and physics.

In the course of my studies I couldn’t help running across Stephen Hawking’s famous question: “If time travel is possible, why aren’t we inundated by tourists from the future?” That got to me. Why aren’t we? Why haven’t we…wait a minute, Stephen Hawking isn’t an historian or a sociologist or an artist. He knows physics and cosmology, and expertise is always specific, not general. Maybe time tourists or scholars are all around and it takes the right kind of expertise to find them.

I switched my major to History forthwith, although what I was hoping for was something more along the lines of Asimov’s psychohistory than the tweed-soaked visions of academia that sprang to most minds. I wanted to look for foci of events, outliers, people who were in such a great place at the best possible time that they had to have had some foreknowledge.

In a word, I was looking for anachronisms.

Of course I looked at all the usual suspects. Da Vinci, Tesla, Edison, Franklin, Avicenna. They all checked out…”

What's the Difference?

Whenever people declare they're going to use cloth diapers instead of disposable ones I always wonder why they don't just use bath towels instead of toilet paper.  I can't think of any arguments that apply to one and not the other.

Starting Fresh

I've decided to start this blog after years at livejournal because I don't like the whiney, twee image livejournal has earned for itself since I started mine in 2002.  I'd like to see how my writing is really viewed when I don't know the readers.

I've noticed the best blogs seem to have a purpose, whether it's reviewing a certain type of product or commenting on a certain type of news or simply slice-of-life comedy.  I don't know if I have enough to say on any one subject to make a choice like that and stick to it.  I'm a watch collector, but I'm not rich enough to really have anything interesting.  I'm a foreigner living in Japan but the absolute last thing the Internet needs is another Japan blog.  I love comedy and always thought I'd give standup a try at least once and have kept a notebook of bits I've written for a few years but I suspect they'd all fit on a single-spaced page so I can't really make this a comedy blog.

I'm sure at first all of these things will appear in my blog, but for now I'll simply say hello to the absolutely nobody who is reading this and say that regardless of whether I can keep this up whatever I do write here will be a post by Slippy, who isn't a whiney livejournaler.